The World Below
by g21lto
Summary: In 12 Grimmauld Place, Ginny ponders, Hermione worries, and the two come to explore their friendship on a deeper level. GWHG. Can be seen as a companion to By Name,.
1. The View from Above

Author's Note: It's been a while since I've written anything, and here's an old, pre-HBP story I found on my hard drive. Another addition to the "Ginny Weasley character exploration series" that began with _By Name,_ and that I never got around to making into an actual series.

So here it is: we begin right before the Dream Team's sixth year. It's an AU, to preserve my pre-HBP ideas. Ginny introspection, Ginny/Hermione pairing comes up later, as well as Death Eater-action.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

* * *

The world is a plain, smooth-grassed, hummocky, extending from the hills as far as the eye can see. Under a hot sun, it glares back at the eyes in shades of white, of gold, of barely-green. There are no hills of course, save to those who climb them. There are few hummocks. Under the white sun, a dizzying, light-on-flesh melee of humans from here to the horizon teems, moves, touches, parts.

A woman-child, melancholy in her too-old eyes, imagines she is the only one who sees.

Too many battles. Or not enough, when one considered that the closest thing to a battle yet had been a short encounter at the Ministry, and Severus had not even taken part. But too many months, too many meetings. Too many potions brewed after hours for the Headmaster, potions whose purpose Severus did not question but could guess from their nature. Too much evidence that he would not survive this war.

And for all he had given, and would yet give – for he knew, certainly, without any reliance on tea leaves or crystal balls, that he would be asked to give much more before anything like an end would come to this – he would still owe a debt to the man called Albus Dumbledore. Likewise to the woman called Minerva McGonagall. Nothing would erase either debt to his benefactors. Especially not to Minerva.

_He was tied to Minerva for eternity by the strings of a duty he could not repay._

Severus paused in mid-stride – a terrible habit he'd picked up in the last year, as bad as nail biting. He'd been pacing the entrance hall to 12 Grimmauld Place for the past fifteen minutes without being conscious of much of his surroundings. Dark-colored stone, not cheered much even by the silver-gray rug Molly had recently laid over it. Hat tree. Staircase (creaky). Covered portrait (dangerous). Closed doors all around. Yes, he'd been reviewing again his great debt, the price he had to pay for being stupid as a teenager.

Just when I think I've gained some self-respect, Severus thought, I lapse right back into self-pity. Into the tragic debt I owe to a woman I've never even hurt.

It was only partially true – he'd seen the disappointment in her eyes when she learned of his early affair with the Death Eaters. But nothing but his own thinking made that in any way a _debt_ he owed.

The connection that his _tragic_ fiction afforded was probably what made it so attractive to his mind. That being so, the fiction was at least a little acceptable. And Minerva _was_ here right now, he remembered as if only just realizing it. That accounted for his current whereabouts, even after his business in the Order meeting had been long finished.

A door opened. It was the door to the kitchen, and despite himself Severus felt a shot of adrenaline enter his system – a minor dose, as any potions master could tell. Minerva stepped into the entrance hall, closing the door on a cheerier yellow lighting that Severus felt no particular kinship with. She saw him and paused, as if not quite sure how to react to meeting him here.

"Good evening, Severus," she said after a bit, adjusting her emerald cloak. Whether she was making too much of the action or doing it absentmindedly, Severus could not tell.

"And to you, Minerva." He realized he had paused in his walking, but it might have seemed rude to continue. "Heading back to the castle?"

"I am," she replied, and Severus found he had an ache of anxiety in his stomach – the awkwardness was nearly too much to bear.

He nodded abruptly. "I bid you safe journey then."

_Must I be such a coward?_

He Disapparated just as abruptly, leaving a blinking Professor McGonagall behind. From the second-floor landing, the toughest witch within a several-kilometers' radius could almost have looked disappointed.

* * *

Ginny didn't stir until McGonagall, too, had Disapparated, and then she only adjusted her position on the second-story floor. It was of the same cold dimension stone as the entrance hall, without benefit of a rug, and more than mildly uncomfortable. Door-watching, she called her newest hobby, for every few minutes of the day at least one of the doors in the hall would open and admit another member of the Order. Sometimes she witnessed interesting meetings like the one she'd just seen. Most of the time the action was more boring. She would wedge herself between an old cabinet and the railing, well out of the light, and sit, and watch. Watch until every detail of the entrance hall was burned into her memory, like the background of a photograph. Too stark and tangible, from here, to be a real place where real people passed through.

That doesn't make _any_ sense, Ginny thought. Quite often. But those were the only words for it. There was an atmosphere to the entrance hall, one that made it hard to believe in once one had seen the place enough.

The entrance hall was a place of dreams; surely it could not be real. It was a place of thought and atmosphere. No one else really knew it like Ginny.

_I spend too much time here._ Ginny thought _that_ quite often as well. And yet, were she at home, this time would have been spent roaming the fields, or maybe walking the road into town and back every day. Anything to be alone – but not here.

She didn't exactly hate the entrance hall. That would have been pointless. A melancholy that said she _would_ have been elsewhere – if if if. This was the place at 12 Grimmauld Place she most liked, the one she conquered as her own. It was nothing to worry about that she kept to her onesome.

A pause in thought while loud footsteps – they could have been thunder – sounded from down the hall. Hermione Granger thundered past in a dream of bushy brown hair, white jumper, and blue denim skirt. _Boom-clapping_ down the stairs, Hermione's passing began Ginny's thought process anew. She'd never thought of Hermione as the "thundering" type. The girl seemed too proper by far. But maybe that's the problem, Ginny mused, maybe I've automatically _assumed_ she is too proper to thunder. A made-to-order mental block. I see her coming and think _dignity_.

Hermione was now running from the bottom stair, across the entrance hall and to the kitchen door. Dignified, no. Not now that Ginny considered her. Too pushy, too mouthy, too disheveled for that.

Dignity seemed to arise out of the older girl's disorder, though. Ginny gave a mental shrug – it didn't matter. These were thoughts of an afternoon in the entrance hall, nothing more.

Nothing less.

Hermione Granger paused before tapping on the kitchen door, turning partially to one side. Her half-visible profile caught whatever meager light there was in the entrance hall. The wan light curving softly down one of her cheeks, and then only her bushy head of hair visible as she faced the door head-on – Ginny swallowed, a sudden warmth in her gut dissipating as Hermione was admitted, and the sliver of yellow cheerfulness disappeared once again (there must have been no important business going on).

Thus it had been nearly all summer. But again, no matter. Whether she encouraged the whole business or not, no matter.

Somewhere in the bowels of 12 Grimmauld Place, a clock struck five in the evening. Ginny stirred again and settled back against the paneled wall. Her discomfort was of her own making. Entirely. And actually, she rather liked that idea.


	2. Ginny on Ginny

Author's Note: More of Ginny's ponderings. Ponderings and feelings that _no one has ever felt before_. Ever. And no, she's not just going through a phase. Of course not. ;-)

Heavy on description and internal reflection, short on action or dialogue. More of those two soon.

* * *

The entrance hall, this place of thought and clouded atmosphere, has but one window: this window faces west. Only in the evenings can anyone not kin to the hall itself find kinship in the light that makes it in this window, thin and whitened at all other times. The hall comes alive now, and its birth happens like this: 

There is nothing but the dark floor, the paneled walls, and above them a cobwebbed chandelier that could almost have been elegant. Nothing changes in the room except that one moment there is nothing, and the next there is a spot of golden liquid on the floor. Directly beneath the window, along the wall, glare on cold dimension stone makes the floor asymmetric. Half closer to one side wall than the other. The liquid gold expands, and migrates, away from the paneling of the wall, across the silver-gray rug where it turns orange. Now a shaft of the same stuff – golden and orange, depending on the side of it you're watching – forms between the window and the spot, which has turned itself into a moving semi-circle. Oh-so-slow.

At times Ginny watches this metamorphosis and journey for what it really is. At times she narrates to herself: _there is a spot of sunlight on the floor, and as the sun gets lower in the sky it makes the sunbeam move. The sun's light catches on motes of dust._ Those sparkling signs of domestic neglect, decades' worth. But whichever way she watches it, it still proceeds the same. That always surprises her.

But this means nothing because next the hall enters the final stages of birth, and the golden orange shaft, sunbeam, what-have-you catches the chandelier. Brass it is called, this thing that reflects and infects the light, newly brass-colored, into every corner of the hall. Brass and crystal, little rainbows in arcs across the floor. The walls will have none of this nonsense, and insist on showing only the golden light.

And occasionally, yes, a door will open and deposit someone into the middle of this nativity. Someone who will blink in the light, or smile at the rainbows, or remember they had something else to do and go back into the kitchen. And occasionally, someone will come out and take Ginny's eyes away from the hall itself, as Albus Dumbledore does today. He walks out into the hall and Ginny sees the glare of light on his spectacles – twin fires, and he might be blinking behind them or not. Vague surprise filters into her mind – he must have arrived very early this morning to have escaped her notice. She watches now, as he strides to the middle of the hall, dead-center on the rug that her mother laid down. He looks up at the window and smiles: and Ginny watches more closely.

Albus Dumbledore turns his wrinkled face from the window, around the walls and straight to Ginny. He gives a solemn little wave, and Disapparates before the girl can decide whether or not he knew she was there all along, or if she had moved, or if the sunbeam, now climbing up the far paneled wall, should really have caught his glasses at the angle it did.

* * *

But it was his solemnity that puzzled Ginny the most. 

He's always cheerful with students, Ginny thought, even here at the Order where we're good for nothing. Perhaps it was tongue-in-cheek.

Either way, the sunbeam was climbing the ceiling now and she'd lost all interest in the hall. As happened from time to time.

With an effort of arms and legs, Ginny wriggled out from her hidden niche. Standing brought a cacophony of popping joints – ankles, knees, hips – that told her she'd been sitting for longer than she'd realized. But again, no matter. Further down the second-floor hallway Ginny entered the room that she and Hermione shared. Like everything else at 12 Grimmauld Place, it was depressing until one got used to it. Ginny had long since accepted the room, not so much because there was no improving it (which there wasn't), as because it belonged to the place she occupied this summer. Atmosphere, or what-have-you. She flopped down on the bed.

_The_ bed. Ginny wasn't sure yet if that fact was welcome or unwelcome to her. Or even if she _wanted_ it to be welcome. Black (what else?) quilt, black canopy. Graying carpet on the floor that might have once been white. Windows letting in some light. A full-length mirror on the far wall. Ginny was in front of it before she realized she was moving toward it, gazing at her reflection.

Silly, she thought. _I always hate remembering how vain I am._

Just enough of a figure for it to give her a sense of inane and unearned pride. Still, and probably always, her face was spotted with freckles. Ginny ran back to the bed, making a dive for the center. She hit it, and rolled over on her back. Spontaneity: one of her virtues.

Not that anything she'd done since entering the room had any meaning. That was reserved for days at the entrance hall, though really _those_ shouldn't have counted either.

* * *

The world is no stranger to melancholy women-children and men-children. They are forever climbing the hills, up and away from the plain of the world, its grass and hummocks. Away from fellow children, men-children, men. Every single quest to this high path is the first and only the world has ever seen, every crusader the first to find this thinner grass, packed-dirt path, sunken lake, which overlooks all they have ever known. 

A dream settles over, has already settled over the woman-child – mildness, uncertainty, wonder. How to explain it? This wonderful frightening place she finds herself has never been visited by another.

She is outside of time and mortality here, dipping her toes in the water of the sunken lake.


	3. Sparring with the Peasants

Author's note: Ginny melodrama, Ginny/Hermione drama. Uh oh!

* * *

"Everyone I know could die in this war," said Ginny out loud. Testing the phrase, seeing what it meant. No, it was too much – it was purposeful melodrama. "Most everyone I love is in mortal danger." That was better. What it meant:

This is all wrong, thought Ginny, shaking her head. If she shook it hard enough, her red hair would fly in front of her face for a moment, a wild mane. And somehow that had the exact same quantity of significance as her second observation, which was, incidentally, true.

It was conceivable that Ginny would be widowed in heart a dozen times over. Brothers, parents (this had already come close to happening, at least with her dad), schoolmates, literally everyone who meant anything to her. Ginny wasn't afraid of being widowed. Ginny wasn't even sure she would feel it.

When she was younger, she had played games with herself to pass the time. One game had been the horror-genre favorite _What if _x_ Died?_ "_X_" was replaced over and over for hours on end with members of her family, with Hermione Granger, with Harry Potter, with Tom Riddle. There was nothing so scintillatingly horrifying to young Ginny than to realize that _none_ of the imagined deaths brought her any real distress. Except for Harry, and for Tom. (How the little woman-child had cursed herself! Mere romance!) Time had passed, and with it both Tom's and Harry's names had dropped from the list. And now, eons later, Ginny took up her game once again, it seemed.

This time the horror she felt was muted into a vague distress – hardly satisfying. I _wish_ I could feel them (If wishes were horses…). But even that wish was meaningless, because Ginny knew from long practice that she would feel something only when her inner self was absolutely convinced of it. And that was a process that nearly always took even Ginny by surprise. She could not _make_ herself love her family and friends. Nor did she feel the need to try: she was what she was, after all. Anything else was dishonesty.

Lying to herself, Ginny knew, was one of the few wrongs that could elicit a genuine response within her. She called that response, with a conscious nod to irony, the _Riddle Alarm_.

Somehow, with the help of the Riddle Alarm and of the entrance hall, Ginny was … different. Whether it had started this summer or not, it had _happened_ this summer.

And of course, the whole thing could be a simple illusion.

* * *

"Hermione!"

She paused with her hand already on the doorknob. The sounds of a recently-adjourned Order meeting made it a feat to even be heard – especially from the next room, which was where Mrs. Weasley had called her from.

"Hermione, dear, come here a minute." Mrs. Weasley was waving her over. Hermione began a walking-shuffling trip through the kitchen, kin more than anything else to a dance. Not that she _minded_ being kept here longer. Nor with the woman who had arranged for her to attend this meeting in the first place. She'd been called to a meeting of the Order. _She_. Not even Fred or George, two years her senior and long since of age, could lay claim to that.

As soon as the thought crossed her mind she shunned it, of course: no need to get cocky. And now Mrs. Weasley was calling her to stay even _after_ the meeting.

Life was very good right now, from Hermione Granger's point of view.

_We're in a war_, Hermione thought. Deadly. Sirius gone already. I've only been to one meeting. We're in a war. Deadly…

A suitable response was shame at herself. Hermione summoned it, her cheeks flaming. And here was Mrs. Weasley, smiling now.

"My dear – now _don't_ look so upset. I just – well – lately you seem to be the only person my daughter will talk to."

Hermione nodded mechanically. And after a brief moment's reflection, realized that it was indeed true.

"Is Ginny – well, this sounds silly – is she really as gloomy as she looks, Hermione? Is there anything we can do to…cheer her up, perhaps?"

Hermione was taken by surprise. Then again, this was the natural question to ask about Ginny Weasley right now. The girl's sudden withdrawal from the human social order had sparked several conversations among those who knew her.

Hermione thought for a moment. "I'm not sure."

Now _that_ had been helpful. She cleared her throat. "I don't think she's properly _gloomy_. Whenever I'm around her, she looks like she's trying to discover…oh, the meaning of life. Something. She's very pensive." There was truly nothing like being flippant toward a worried mother asking about her daughter's mental health!

"She's not depressed, if that's what you're worried about," said Hermione quickly. "She seems quiet, but alright – "

Mrs. Weasley looked at her for a moment, and then she laughed, breaking the tension. "Well, good luck to her, and tell her to share her revelations with us once she's done. Go on, Hermione dear. And just make sure Ginny knows she's _not_, in fact, among strangers."

Hermione nodded and left, reversing the room-crossing dance with considerably less vigor, out the door and out of the sweet yellow light.

* * *

A thundering in the hallway makes Ginny sit up. The black quilt wrinkles and unwrinkles as a body leaves it. Black canopies observe the event without even a breeze-ripple. Gray carpet absorbs the impact of bare, pale feet. Another girl enters the room, and the room becomes a stage, and the two women its dancers in steps so delicate they almost don't resemble steps in a dance.

A how-d'you-do, a how-d'you-do, a circling of the other, an appraisal. Pride and friendship in turning. Communication a razor-thin string linking them. Ginny's half-wish to cut the string, broken by the other herself. Hermione's half-wish to take the string, like a lasso, and ensnare Ginny into giving up more than just a string of meaning between eyes. A desire broken by pride. Let Mrs. Weasley do her own spywork.

_Is that all I was at the meeting for?..._

The string – there is no changing it. At least, not for now. Ginny and Hermione are too comfortable in this dance, whirling in a circle now, only the string connecting them.

* * *

Hermione, dear Hermione – did not know how to shut up. She was a dream of a girl whose intellect and bravery lifted her far above others of their age, and Ginny had immense affection for her. But –

"Hermione!" Ginny held up a hand, laughed a bit. "Hermione, who'd have thought you liked Quidditch so much?"

The greater girl was taken aback, visibly – _unless,_ Ginny thought, _unless she is simply calculating how best to feel me out. I sense Mum's handiwork._ But maybe _both_ explanations were wrong, because after a few seconds Hermione shrugged and let her hands drop as she moved to the window. And that, thought Ginny, was quite a room-chiller.

Nothing like calling out well-intentioned bullshit to lighten the mood.

Hermione was looking out the window now, across a ten-meter stone courtyard into the mirror-image window on 14 Grimmauld Place. Ginny wondered if Hermione was ever amazed, even briefly, that barely ten meters away from their hiding-hole another family was going about a completely normal life. Well – not entirely normal – for it was a Muggle family. But then, that _would _be normal for Hermione. To Ginny, this fact was novel and quite amazing. Though of course she'd known for years that Hermione was Muggle-born. Blame the entrance hall.

"The Cannons _do_ have better prospects this season, though," she added belatedly. Now _that_ had been a transparent apology, and a second-guessing as well as a dishonesty.

Violent head-shake – not quite the most socially graceful of gestures.

Hermione turned from the window, frowning. "Now what was _that_ for?" She looked stern, which for her was of course only natural.

A rising tide of anger in Ginny was of course only natural as well and, now she was used to it, hardly distracting in her search for an answer.

"I'm tired of just sitting around," Ginny replied with barely a pause. It was a safe explanation – something they _all_ felt, Ginny, Hermione and Ron. She whirled around, bare heel in the carpet rubbed numb. Pace. Pace.

"That's all," Ginny said in a quieter voice. When she looked at the older girl again, Hermione was frowning in an even more oh-grow-up way.

"Ginny, I wouldn't think that _you_ of all people could forget that we're _all_ going through that feeling. There's no call for self-aggrandizing drama."

Pause. The carpet really _was _a mouldering shade of grayed-white. Of all the Hermione-like things to say, this was the most Hermione-like of all, and the one Ginny had least expected. Funny how her eyes would really only register a searing white right now.

"Just stop it, we don't need that. None of us."

The most exquisite of the last straws.

_I'm going to cry. I know I am, whether I'm wanting to or not._

The carpet, mouldering gray, to the bed to the girl framed in golden-white light, Ginny slowly turned around.

"_Don't_ we all?" Five seconds to tears. "Or _are_ we all in the same handbasket?"

It _was_ a fair point. Petty, and it made her exit look all the more childish – but _Hermione_ was one to lecture her on patience, even if Ginny had cared that the older girl had attended a meeting.

I _don't_ care, she thought with surprise. But if I have to say anything else –

In the outside world where an argument was still going on, Hermione showed just enough hesitation. Ginny turned heel again and stormed out of the room.


End file.
